On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 08:06:08AM -0800, adit y wrote: > I am not talking about debian in particular but linux in general > > 1. How long is it going to be free ?
Forever. > 2. Is there any possibility of this becoming a copyrighted software in > future ? ( i mean some company taking over and saying that only i am > the owner and only i can make modifications) No. Some company might try to do that with BSD-or-similarly-licensed bits, but we could always fork an older version. The only possibility of problems, as far as I can see, would be patent claims. I don't think that's realistically going to cause a problem for the whole system, though; with companies like IBM who have more intellectual property than many whole countries interested in developing GNU/Linux, we should be OK. > So are there any tabs here in linux where it can not become not free > in future. so any gpl derived software needs to be gpled but what > about the other way, can you start including non gpled software > ,closed sourced modules in gpled software. No, you can't link non-GPL code with GPL code. That counts as a derived work. dlopen()able modules are debatable, but the FSF's line is that the combination of program and modules counts as a single program. Mere aggregation, e.g. the inclusion of two programs on the same CD, doesn't require compatible licensing. > if that is possible then with each new release can included a included > a lot of non gpled software being used from gpled, eventually by the > time you get into version 50.0 it might become 2% free and 98% not > free. looks like some flavors of linux are going that way. They're doing that with extra programs, not modules for existing programs, as far as I know. However, you're guaranteed that the 'main' distribution of Debian will always consist only of free software, and, with the odd nitpick over things like firmware for odd devices, I think it's vanishingly unlikely that the Linux kernel itself will ever be anything other than free. http://www.debian.org/social_contract Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
